My name is Sebastian Windele. I'm a 28 year old software developer living in Melbourne Australia. I have used windows based PC's since high school and have never used, let alone owned, an Apple computer in my life. That is until now...

My 2 day old Macbook Pro Died!

OK. So I got this new Macbook pro, quickly installed OSX Leopard and a bunch of other applications and began playing arround with all the hyped up Leopard features. One of the features I wanted to try out was Bootcamp. I wanted to install Windows XP via Bootcamp. “Why?” I hear you ask…Just because I wanted to see it in action. I am commited to converting to Apple OSX…Honest!

I started up bootcamp and followed the instructions as best as a newbie could be expected. I Selected a 10 GIG partition to put Windows XP on (I have since learned that this is not really enough and would use 32 GIG next time). I clicked Partition to move to the next step, poped in my Windws XP disc and hit GO. The machine was busy for a while, then rebooted to the Windows XP blue installer screen…All good. It spent a few minutes reading the XP disc then got to the screen where you choose the partition to install to. There was only 1 partition and it was 130 GIG. This seemed strange so I quit the installer. The machine rebooted and the process XP installer repeated. Same problem. I quit again, this time I held down he mouse button during startup so the XP disc would be ejected.

For a list of bootup key combinations for Macs click here.

The disc came out and I was presented with a plain grey screen. Nothing happened so I rebooted. Same grey screen…Not looking good. None of the boot key combos made any difference. I tried putting in the OSX Leopard disc and booting to that but it did not work…Same grey screen.

Time to phone Apple Support
I Apple a call and their techie got me to try a bunch of those bootup key combos but to no avail. Hesaid that the firmware must have been corupted and I should take it to an Apple service center. Noooooooooo. I have only had it for 2 days!

I took it to the service center and they promised they would look at it the next day. The next day the service technition called me to say the firmware on the main logic board was corrupt and could not be restored by any means. The machine required a replacement logic board (very expensive part). The part was ordered and installed 2 days later (at no cost to me). The hard drive also needed formating. I had to start over from scratch.

There is some info on this problem here on the Apple support forums. It says that you should check that it is XP with Service Pack 2 that you shouldbe using with Bootcamp because XP with Service Pack 1 would not work. Fair enough, I overlooked this but I don’t think it should have cost me my shinney new Macbook Pro.

I must admit that the service that Apple gave me after the thing died was very good. That is the only saving grace for this whole episode.

Now that I am up and running again, I’ll start talking about some applications I have started using and how an Apple virgin stumbles through them.